1992 10Best Cars

And a glimpse into the future, too.

This is the tenth year we’ve winnowed the season’s new cars down to Ten Best. We regard it as a heavy responsibility, and yet—and yet—for a troop of car guys, what could be lighter work?

Each autumn, we round up about an acre of cars that we think have a chance of earning a spot on Ten Best. This thinking is based on what we learn driving every new car as soon as it becomes available. Each staffer then drives the entire field of nominees and files his rating sheet. Combining the ratings produces the Ten Best.

Only a few restrictions apply. There has always been a price limit— $30,000 at first, raised to $35,000 in 1988, and raised again this year, to $40,000. Sure, cars priced higher are great, but greatness for less is Best. We used to reserve five spots each for domestic and imported cars, until foreign labels built in U.S. plants blurred the distinction. Now, instead, we limit to two cars per brand on the final Ten Best list, our version of the Olympics limit of three athletes per nation.

Ten Best Cars is unique in that it’s untethered by rules of strict categories. It doesn’t care what’s the best sports car or the best family hauler. It seeks overall bests, homing in on a model year’s best achievements like a heat-seeking Stinger sniffing out an Iraqi helicopter. If the world’s automakers were to unleash ten breakthrough four-doors in a given season, it’s entirely possible that those ten sedans would bump everything else off the winning list.

A best-seeker is every consumer’s dream, wouldn’t you agree? But after ten years of Ten Best Cars, we see something more. We see a record—a database of automotive achievement—from which trends emerge, trends that forecast the future of the automobile in America. When viewed as leading indicator, Ten Best Cars has been predicting the following:

—The rise of Japan as a source of Best Cars. On the first Ten Best list in 1983, Japanese brands tied the Europeans at three cars each. Last year, the Japanese earned eight spots, nine if you credit Mazda engineering for the Mercury Tracer LTS’s success. Clearly the Japanese have taken the lead in providing nimble, efficient cars with nifty mechanisms that reward the driver. If our enthusiast’s bias for fun-to-drive cars is showing here, it knows no national boundaries—it works for BMW and the Taurus SHO, too. More to the point, American buyers are responding to these same pleasures as they choose more and more Japanese cars.

Ten Best trends suggest that the appeal of Japanese cars will keep on rising.

—The weakening of Europe as a market force. Historically, Europe was the leading source of imported cars. The high point came in 1986, with four Europeans on the list. It’s been fast fade since: no Europeans made the cut in 1990 and 1991.

Think back to the mid-eighties. The Volkswagen Rabbit GTI was the fun car of choice then. Where is the popularly priced European fun car now? In the sports-car business, Porsche was a real contender over a wide price range: the 944 made Ten Best the first four years. Now there isn’t a single Porsche priced under our $40,000 ceiling. What European maker can you turn to for an affordable sports car?

Ten Best trends point to Europe’s fading competitiveness in the U.S. market just as surely as do the obituaries of MG, Triumph, Rover, Fiat, Renault, Peugeot, and Sterling. The fact that a lone European, the BMW 325i, did make the list this year doesn’t change the trend.

—The emergence of the minivan as the new family car. It’s a measure of the minivan’s rightness that it has managed to break through our fun-to-drive bias in 1985 (Chrysler), 1990 (Mazda MPV), and in a big way last year (Mazda MPV and Toyota Previa). Minivans aren’t fun, but their efficiency and usefulness is so compelling that they often push aside some perfectly wonderful cars in our ratings.

Ten Best trends predict a bright future for this only-a-decade-old type of automobile, which already sells almost a million units a year.

—The resurgence of Nissan as a carmaker of note. Nissan this year took a hit from the two-winner limit: the Maxima SE— rated third among Nissan’s entries—was dropped. Nissan (then Datsun) was strong in the seventies, then it lost the scent. But the company has placed two cars among the Ten Best for four consecutive years now, which predicts a strong future.

How reliable is this indicator? After a similar showing by Ford in the four years beginning in 1986 (accompanied by phenomenal success in the market), the company dropped back to one winner in 1990. Very quickly, Ford’s sales softened.

Honda (before the two-winner limit) had three cars on the list in 1985 and 1988. Even more impressive, over the Ten Best history Honda has averaged 1.9 cars per year on the list, a record unmatched by any other maker. Honda’s growth in sales over the period is also unmatched.

The magic of Ten Best is the way it crosses body-style distinctions and national borders in a straight-ahead quest for goodness. The insight it gives into cars and car markets is simply unmatched. Other car magazines apparently agree, or they wouldn’t be jumping in with imitations of their own.